Ignore Sunk Costs
This is the best Seth Godin podcast I’ve listened to, because most people are uninformed on the topic. The question is whether you use the past to cripple your future, whether you can handle the feedback from your peers when you say you’re going in the other direction.
It’s a conundrum. No one wants to quit and everybody wants to quit. Seth says the greatest successes are quitters. Because they’re willing to walk away from that which isn’t working for them. Whereas the successes who don’t quit go through a “dip,” where they’re unsure of their progress yet soldier on and get to the other side.
I come from the a no quit background, but I’m not sure it always works for me. Sometimes you’ve got to leave it all behind. Both physical and emotional. You’ve got all the totems of the past to remind you who you were, are they really holding you back? Then again, what’s lacking in this world is perseverance, most people give up, even before the going gets tough, and everything worth achieving is fraught with a long, lonely process with sleepless nights and questioning of one’s path.
But Seth’s point here is sometimes you’ve got to abandon the path you were on, even if you invested in it. His best example is scoring the last two tickets to the Friday night movie and then running into someone who offers you great “Hamilton” tickets for free. Yes, you’re gonna blow thirty bucks, but you’re gonna end up with something worth much more, can you make the leap?
This is something I see too often in music. Since you were a musician, you must remain a musician. Believing if you just work hard enough you’ll make it. But oftentimes this is not true, but if you give up you’re fearful everybody will excoriate you, but at what price happiness? Figuring out who you want to be and executing on that is what makes you happy.
The people who should listen to this podcast most are those who followed in the prescribed footsteps and can’t get out of the pathway. I know a few lawyers who love what they do, but most I know don’t. But they went to law school, they paid their dues, they’re getting paid a certain amount, they can’t step out into the unknown.
Even worse are those in finance. It’s a dreary business for most, yet they cannot give up the cash. But it’s to their own personal detriment.
I guarantee you’ll listen to this podcast and contemplate your choices. Ask yourself what you can free yourself from. What you can abandon, who you can be.
It’s very short, less than half an hour. My only complaint is that’ it’s TOO short. I would love to hear Seth riff on this for an hour or two.
